Heat map

A heat map is an information visualization technique that uses color to represent attributes of information in a two-dimensional image. Heat maps use shades or colors to differentiate values in a data set or to identify focus areas in a data set. Different colors indicate an anomaly (eg: red in a group that is mostly green), consistent colors in a group indicate a trend.

Treemap

Tree maps maps aid in identifying critical issues, allocating resources and finding trends or relationships in data sets by showing the line items from datasets in a visual format that the brain is more capable of percieving. This allows anomolies, distributions, relationships and trends to be identified.

Geographic (thematic) maps

Geographic heat maps highlight anomalies, trends and distributions across a geographic area by taking each entity on the map, such as a country or state and coloring that entity with a single color to represent the data value for that entity.

Color Brewer was built by the authors of Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Usersand provides guidance as to how to mix and match colors, including color-blind friendly, print friendly and photocopy friendly color schemes.

Proportionality / relativity table

I discovered this table on an excellent Spanish picture vocabulary web site. It displays the countries with the most Spanish-language speakers. What I like about this table is the third column that is used to show the relative size of the numbers. I think it really adds value to the table.

Country

Number of Spanish Speakers

(approximate; X=10,000,000 people)

Mexico

91 million

X X X X X X X X X

Colombia

41.9 million

X X X X

Argentina

35.6 million

X X X

Spain

29.9 million

X X X

Venezuela

23.3 million

X X

USA

20.7 million

X X

Peru

20.4 million

X X

Chile

13.6 million

X

Ecuador

11.8 million

X

Dominican Republic

8.2 million

X

Video

Here’s an interesting animation. You could display it in a meeting and tell a user story over the top of it instead of traditional power point shows.